Search Engine Optimization: Popularity Index?

The aesthetic value of a website does not always drive people to visit it. Online marketing strategy does not start and end in the creation of fancy websites. In order to maximize your reach, other tools and processes have to be implemented to drive website traffic to your site. Without any visitors, you probably won’t make any money.

With search engine optimization, websites now have greater chances of being viewed. It is also otherwise referred to as positioning and placement. Defined as the process of developing websites to make these obtain higher rankings in search engines, SEO is the biggest and the ultimate leap to achieve top ranks.

Search engine optimization was adopted by content providers and webmasters since the middle of 1990. During that time, a webmaster only had to submit a certain site to different search engines which would in turn run spiders. These spiders are actually a type of program that “crawled” pages and managed a database for data storage.

Initially, search engine optimization works with website information supplied by webmasters. The earliest search algorithm form depended heavily on the supplied information like the meta keywords or meta tags. However, indexing the pages based on meta data was considered less reliable basically because most webmasters abuse the concept of meta tags through the inclusion of other keywords that are irrelevant to the pages’ content. This is done so that they can ensure higher page impressions and improve ad revenue.

Currently, Yahoo is the only main search engine that considers the use of meta keywords in its search algorithm. There is not much clear information regarding the meta keyword efficiency though, due to the confidentiality maintained by search engines when they do rankings.

Even if meta tags are recommended for use in web pages, a lot of search engine optimization experts insist that “description” tag is far more important. But even then, rankings are still continually being manipulated by some webmasters in the effort of improving their position. Because of this, a new search engine was conceived so that the various search engines may be able to provide the most useful and relevant web pages to its clients.

Google was responsible for the search engine optimization called PageRank. This innovative concept of web page evaluation looks at the page’s usefulness based on incoming links. This method means that there are some links that are more important than others. In short, a page with a higher PageRank has the greatest chances of being viewed by a random surfer.

The various search engines agree that the following things dictate a page’s ranking. These are: keywords contained in links that point to a page; title tag keywords; visible text keywords; and link popularity.